About Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

My name is Jensen Harris and I'm the Director of Program Management for the Microsoft Windows User Experience Team.

I previously was Group Program Manager of the Office 2007 and Office 2010 User Experience teams. Our team was responsible for the overall interaction and visual design of the programs that ship in Office. Most recently, we completed a total user interface redesign of Office which shipped as part of the Office 2007 and which was improved in Office 2010.

Although we worked very closely with the individual application teams (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc.) to help solve difficult usability issues specific to those programs, our key responsibility was to design and develop the UI framework that people use to interact with all of Office.

In short, the team's mission is to help make sure that you can find and use the functionality in Office as seamlessly as possible.

Some background on me: I've worked at Microsoft for eleven years; before that I was a summer intern twice. I spent my first five years at Microsoft working on the Outlook e-mail and PIM program, both for the Macintosh and for Windows. The last project I worked on was leading the redesign of the Outlook 2003 user interface that shipped in Office 2003. After work on Office 2003 concluded in August of 2003, I moved to the overall Office User Experience Team--first as a Lead Program Manager and then later as Group Program Manager.

In mid-2009, I left the Office team to take a position as Director of Program Management for Windows User Experience.

Before I joined Microsoft, I graduated with a degree in music composition from Yale University. For high school, I attended Interlochen Arts Academy and graduated with a double major in music composition and trombone performance.

In this blog, I write my thoughts about the ins and outs of defining and designing the user experience of Microsoft Office. I write frequently about the future of Office but also sometimes the past. And there are times I find it irresistible to delve into general user interface issues or even software issues in general.

In particular, this blog is all about the new Office user interface which shipped as part of Office 2007. This new version does away with menus and toolbars and replaces them with new paradigms such as the Ribbon, Contextual Tabs, the Mini Toolbar, and Galleries.

I look forward to reading your comments and hearing suggestions on what would you would like to see me cover. Dive in, there's plenty to read!

Since we signed off on Office 2007 in October 2006, we've been hard at work on the next version, Office 2010. As successful has Office 2007 has been, it represented but a first step in our journey towards rethinking the user experience of Office. Office...

I was reading through commentary from people who attended last week's MIX conference in Las Vegas. Running across Miguel de Icaza's kind words reminded me that I hadn't posted a follow-up about my MIX talk yet.
Last week, I presented a session at MIX...

Just a short note to let you know that I'll be presenting a new session during MIX in Las Vegas on Friday, March 7 at 10:00 entitled "The Story of the Ribbon." In this session, I'm going to present the story of the Ribbon--the customer problems that we...

It's been a while since I last wrote in this space. Many of you have been kind enough to send me e-mail sometime in the last few months, making sure that I was OK and wondering if I was planning to write here anymore. Was I abducted by aliens? Put into...

Today's Guest Writer: Eric Faller
Eric is a Software Design Engineer on the Office User Experience team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers.
Another source of frequently-asked RibbonX questions is around the complexity...

Today is the official business launch of Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007.
This means that as of today, businesses can get these products and start deploying them within their organization.
The consumer launch...

Today I'm delighted to present a new guest writer to the blog: Eric Faller, Software Design Engineer on the
Office User Experience Team.
Eric is one of the developers on our team who helped to design and implement RibbonX, the user interface extensibility...

For the last year or so, one of the questions I've been asked again and again has been: "Can I use the new Office user interface in my own product?"
On one hand, it's an immensely satisfying question to hear, because it means that others in the industry...

Now that we've released Office 2007 to manufacturing, developers can get started modifying their solutions so that they're ready to test with the released version of Office.
Final versions of the RibbonX schema and Control ID list will be published...

I've published over 200 posts on this blog since I started it last September.
With all of those posts, it can be hard to remember what you've read and what you haven't… and it can be hard for new people to jump in and figure out where to start reading...

I'm proud to announce that last Friday, November 3 at approximately 2:30 PM, we signed off on build 4518.1014 as the 2007 Microsoft Office system and released it to manufacturing.
This was followed by a ship party for everyone in Office including a...

This morning, I posted the final customUI XML schema for creating Office 2007 RibbonX-based solutions.
You can use this schema to develop solutions that will work with the upcoming final release of Office 2007; it will also continue to work just fine...

I know in my last post I said that I'd be gone for a few days… and now those few days have stretched into a few weeks.
One of the reasons I've been off the blog for a while is that we've been extremely busy putting the final touches on Office 2007....

You may have noticed that I haven't posted for the last week.
I wish I could say that I've been on a fabulous vacation, but in reality, I spent two weeks on the road, talking to people about the Office 2007 UI. That trip, combined with an extremely...

Today's Guest Writer: Savraj Dhanjal Savraj is a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team focused on user interface extensibility for Office developers.
As you may have discovered, we made a few tweaks to the UI developer story in Beta 2...

This morning, the Beta 2 Technical Refresh of the 2007 Microsoft Office system became available for download.
You can download it now from the Microsoft Download Center .
(The download link above is the main download link. You also view the list...

This morning, we announced that starting tomorrow (Thursday, Septemeber 14) you'll be able to download the Beta 2 Technical Refresh build of Office 2007 (build 4407.1005).
Note: There's a newer post now with the download link . You can keep reading...

One of the new features in the upcoming Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh that I haven't written about yet is something we call the Quick Customize Menu.
As you may know, the Quick Access Toolbar is a customizable part of the UI in which you can...

One of our goals for the Office 2007 user interface was to make it easier to create beautiful output.
In many circumstances, you are judged by the quality of the output you create. And software that helps you create beautiful output makes you look...

It was with a bit of surprise that I read a flurry of stories on Friday with breathless headlines like "Microsoft backs off the Ribbon in Office 2007!" and "Microsoft Cuts Office 2007 Ribbon!"
Part of working at a company like Microsoft is that people...

One of the most well-understood and salient principles underlying the ergonomics of graphical user interface design is Fitts' Law .
Named for Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University, Fitts' Law is a mathematical model of fine motor control...

One of the efficiency affordances added to Office over a decade ago is the Recent Documents list.
At the bottom of the File menu in Office 2003, you'll see your four most recently-opened documents listed; you can click one of them to open the file...

On Thursday, I wrote about how Office 2003 renders the user interface using a table of several thousand colors .
Some of you commented that we're crazy to do so much work. Perhaps, but keep in mind that I'm not just talking about the menus and toolbars;...

As you probably know by now, each of the Office 2007 programs (both classic UI and new UI) have the ability to render themselves in several different color schemes.
What determines which color scheme is used when, and what are the defaults?
Before...

Some of you have noted that recently I've been writing a little less frequently than in the months before. For a long time, I did five articles a week; recently, I've been doing three or four most weeks.
One reason for this is that I've been trying...